Mariner Housewife is a chronicle of the ups and downs of your average Mariners devotee: the joy, the anguish, the sputtering rage and disbelief… but primarily the persistent optimism and unbridled loyalty of a genuine fan.

Adding Insult to Injury

There’s got to be a term for the feeling you get when you turn on a baseball game (or pull up Gameday) which you fully expect your team to be winning, and it turns out they are down by a good number of runs. It’s a little like a punch to the gut, combined with disbelief and horror, plus a pinch of sadness thrown in. This keeps happening to me. It happened last night after I got home from taking Brendan Ichiro swimming, and I found that Jamie Moyer was not following my advice to win a quick one at all! Now maybe I am partially to blame for my misplaced confidence in us winning the last two games of this series. But it would have made such perfect sense! Oakland wouldn’t have even seen it coming!

This sensation is made even worse when you misread the score at first, and think your team is on the plus side. I got home from some errands today, and before putting Brendan down for a nap, I checked the internet for the M’s score. “Oh terrific, we’re up 4-1!” I said to myself. But then I came back to check on the scoring plays, and it dawned on me that four of those scoring plays involved an A, and only one involved an M. Now that’s a punch to the gut. Of course, there was a bright spot in today’s game, and his name is Ichiro. Four hits! Four hits! Like I told you, he always has a slow April, and I know he probably won’t get the attention he deserves until the Mariners start threatening to take a post-season spot, but the fact remains that he is one of the most exciting hitters in baseball.

So just when I thought it had gotten as bad as it could get, what with being swept by the A’s and all, today got even worse, baseball-wise. Because I saw this headline: Spiezio Leads Cards’s Win. “Who leads Cards to a win??” I said to myself. “Surely that can’t be Scott Spiezio, last year’s most useless player? Scott Spiezio, cabbie abuser? Scott Spiezio, my least favorite Mariner of all time? They must be referring to a different Spiezio. A Jimmy Spiezio, maybe, or a Phil Spiezio.” But nope, I read the story, and the same Scott Spiezio was the hero of the Cardinals game. I didn’t even know he was still playing the game professionally. I assumed he had retired and was devoting his uselessness to his useless music full time. Bah.